The value of non-executive directors to small and medium size enterprises, including a gender perspective

The role and value of NEDs is well defined within listed companies but little is known about NEDs in the SME market. Given the importance of SMEs to the economy and the need to support their growth and development, TLT, ACCA, Transpire and Practice commissioned this report to address the following six key factors relating to the value of NEDs in SMEs:•What is the need for NEDs in the SME market?•What is the recruitment process for NEDS and who determines who is hired? •How are NEDs integrated into the board/company, for example, through networking, mentoring, and induction programmes?•What does a NED role entail in an SME?•What are the challenges for NEDs and their organisations?•What are the terms of engagement in relation to NEDs

Exploring power assumptions in the leadership and management debate

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to take a fresh look at the leadership and management debate through exploring underlying power assumptions in the literature. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a conceptual discussion that draws on the power-based literature to develop a framework to help conceptually understand leadership in relation to management.Findings – The paper highlights the historically clichéd nature of comments regarding conceptual similarities and differences between leadership and management. The paper draws attention to a problem within this debate – a confusion regarding assumptions of power. As a result the paper brings to the forefront perspectives of management that are of an emergent and non-work perspective which enables the development of a framework of the literature that includes managers “doing” leadership, managers “becoming” leaders, “being” leaders and managers, and leaders “doing” management. The paper goes on to explore the meaning and potential behind each part of the framework and suggests a need to develop an understanding of “doing” leadership and management and “being” managers and leaders through an exploration of “becoming” in organisations.Originality/value – This paper provides a new perspective on the leadership and management or leadership vs management question by introducing a non-work, emergent or personal perspective on management. Furthermore, this paper concludes that whether leadership and management are similar or different is dependent upon which power construct underlies each phenomenon, a consideration that has been neglected in the leadership and management debate for some time

Ways of leading in non-Anglophone contexts: Representing, expressing and enacting authority beyond the English-speaking world

Special Issue Editoria

Host country employees’ negative perceptions of successive expatriate leadership: The role of leadership transference and implicit leadership theories

Purpose. Drawing on socio-cognitively orientated leadership studies, this paper aims to contribute to our understanding of host country employees’ (HCEs) negative perceptions of successive expatriate leadership by exploring how their memories of shared past experiences affect these perceptions. Contrary to previous work which tends to focus on HCEs’ attitudes towards individual expatriates, the authors shift attention to successive executive expatriate assignments within a single subsidiary. Design/methodology/approach. The paper is based on an intrinsic case study carried out in a Polish subsidiary of an American multinational pharmaceutical company which had been managed by four successive expatriate General Managers and one local executive. The authors draw on interview data with 40 HCEs. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff who had been managed by at least three of the subsidiary’s expatriate leaders. Findings. The authors demonstrate how transference triggered by past experiences with expatriate leaders as well as HCEs’ implicit leadership theories affect HCEs’ negative perceptions of expatriate leadership and lead to the emergence of expatriate leadership schema. Originality/value. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that explores the role of transference and implicit leadership theories in HCEs’ perceptions of successive executive expatriate assignments. By focussing on retrospective accounts of HCEs who had been managed by a series of successive expatriate leaders, our study has generated a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of the role of HCEs’ shared past experiences in shaping their perceptions of expatriate leadership. The authors propose a new concept – expatriate leadership schema – which describes HCEs’ cognitive structures, developed during past experiences with successive expatriate leaders, which specify what HCEs believe expatriate leadership to look like and what they expect from it

The value of non-executive directors to small and medium size enterprises,including a gender perspective

This is a report of a sponsored project on the value of NEDs to SMEs, including a gender perspective

Exploring Critical Perspectives of Toxic and Bad Leadership Through Film

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. The Problem This article considers concepts of toxic and bad leadership from a critical, post-structuralist perspective and illustrates how this can be conveyed to management students through the use of film analysis. In response to the paucity of critical approaches within toxic and bad leadership studies, we suggest that film is a useful way of developing in-depth discussion in student and management groups to uncover underlying subtleties and complexity in leadership theory and practice. The Solution We connect to film clips from Batman: The Dark Knight, and explain how this film is used with students and managers to illustrate the ambiguous nature of “good” and “bad” leadership and explore the fluid, shifting, and relational nature of these two concepts. We conclude that students and managers can recognize this more readily through viewing, discussing, and analyzing film clips such as the ones discussed herein. The Stakeholders University lecturers and students, executive educators and managers, general human resource development (HRD) professional

Developing and spreading leadership across levels: The facilitating and constraining role of context

Leadership development programmes increasingly encourage plural forms of leadership to counteract the pitfalls of individualistic approaches. This paper contributes to our understanding of the role of context in developing and spreading leadership across hierarchies. Working within an omnibus approach to context, previous research has highlighted the role of institutional forces in the emergence of distributed leadership in the public sector, yet so far neglected the influence of the discrete organisational context. Drawing on an in-depth case study of a private sector organisation trying to recover from a turbulent past through an in-house leadership development initiative, we show how the omnibus and discrete organisational contexts jointly facilitate and constrain the development and spread of leadership and how they are instrumentalised in this process. We surface how social and political dynamics associated with socio-material relationships and institutional arrangements, together with wider omnibus forces, influence the aim of an inhouse LDP and its potential to impact perceptions and practice of distributed leadership in organisational settings. We argue that a nested approach to context – encompassing the interconnected omnibus and discrete contexts – is required for a deeper understanding of the factors that facilitate and constrain the development and spread of leadership

Editorial announcement: new associate editors and editorial board members

This is an announcement of new associate editors and editorial board members to join the Editorial Board of Leadership

Editorial: What makes a good article for leadership? Thoughts and views from our associate editors, part 1

This issue of Leadership marks our first full year as Co-Editors-in-Chief. As we highlighted in our introductory editorial (Edwards and Schedlitzki, 2023) we see our role as striving to develop the community of the journal in its endeavour to be a key, critical and contemporary voice for leadership studies. To continue this journey, and to help contributors frame and develop their work for submission to the journal, we have invited some of our Associate Editors to share their thoughts on the following questions: 1. What do you look for in a strong article, suitable for submission to Leadership? 2. What do you see as a critical contribution to leadership studies? 3. Can you highlight and/or explore some past articles published in Leadership that exemplify your views